The human right to privacy raises a plethora of global policy, legal and political challenges for governments.

For seven decades, people from across the world have flocked to ANU to be the first to learn the nature of things. As the University marks its 70th birthday, ANU Reporter asked the ANU community one question: What does ANU mean to you?

Running late to a dinner from a psychology class worked out very well for MARCIA and LUAN VANNITHONE, as they tell RICHARD FOX.

We sat down with EMERITUS PROFESSOR PETER DRYSDALE AO, PhD ’68 to talk about his four decades as a lecturer.

The experience of the mountain the day after the 18 January 2003 Canberra fires is etched on my brain.

From an education perspective, engineering is a relatively new discipline at ANU but our alumni show what an astounding and unbelievably rewarding career path it can lead to.

Did I really send my son to crèche with a raw potato? My husband feebly proclaimed to all that I thought it was a pear. I blamed the child. Perhaps it was just the 80s, the madness of learning to be a mother and an academic at the same time. It never dawned on me that the PhD was just circuit training, and it would take me a decade to find my rhythm for teaching, marking, supervising, researching, publishing and trying to get the next job.

Starting a PhD in the Research School of Social Sciences in 1971, I was something of a category mistake.

In 1964, ANU was a campus of two parts. There was the Institute of Advanced Studies, with its internationally-recognised research focus, and the School of General Studies (SGS), with a traditional undergraduate and postgraduate structure.

ANU was most fortunate in having been allocated a beautiful site by Walter Griffin with an intimate town and gown relationship as well as close Federal and local governmental access. Its first few decades after 1946 were a unique opportunity for an optimum development of a new and significant campus in Canberra.

Tackling the challenge of mental health issues among young people is a topic universities across the world are struggling to get to grips with.

Much has happened to the national university during the past seven decades. Turn back time and look through 70 important dates for ANU.

For a long time, we have thought of Antarctica as isolated from the rest of the world. The continent is entirely surrounded by the Southern Ocean, which heaves with giant waves whipped up by intense winds and is home to the world’s strongest ocean current, the eastward-flowing Antarctic circumpolar current (ACC).

In 1946, the year ANU was founded, the world’s first electronic general purpose computer was unveiled to the public in Philadelphia, US. And there was plenty of it to see.

An infrastructure crisis is affecting Australia’s largest capital cities. The sobering everyday reality of bumper-to-bumper jams has taken the shine off cities like Sydney that are creaking under the strain of inadequate transport infrastructures that cannot cope with the volume of people moving today.

In March 2014, an unknown outbreak began killing people in remote villages in Guinea. It was similar to past Ebola outbreaks I’d been involved in, so I was unsurprised when Médecins Sans Frontièrs (MSF) asked if I could come to Guinea.

Half a century of research into Aboriginal outstations landed an ANU academic in the centre of a political debate. EVANA HO reports.

India and Ireland may be thousands of kilometres apart but the countries are closer in musical traditions than you may think, according to ANU research.

One Friday a month, two scholars from the sciences make their way across Sullivans Creek to the ANU Humanities Research Centre (HRC) in the AD Hope Building.

From within the walls of lecture theatres and research labs set across a leafy sanctuary at the heart of the national capital has grown one of world’s leading centres of academic excellence.

It started with a New Year’s resolution but for Dr Waratah Lahy, BA (Visual) (Hons) ’99, PhD ’07, sketching some of the most high profile speakers at ANU has earned her a healthy social media following.

Whether you’re a prime minister, an actor, an historian, an anthropologist or a criminal, if you made an important impact on Australia’s national psyche, your story will be in the ADB.